Romney: The Gun Lobby’s Mitch

During Tuesday’s night’s debate, Mitt Romney indicated staunch opposition to any attempt to regulate gun ownership. But earlier, as one-term governor of Massachusetts, he had taken the opposite position, rather proudly taking credit for a bipartisan assault weapon ban.

As he often does, Romney explained this latest flip-flop with a complicated story, involving a fair amount of hand signals and his funny little head cant, about the pro-gun lobby in Massachusetts getting in bed with the anti-gun folks and everybody waking up all smiles in the morning.

It wasn’t true, of course. In fact, the people of Massachusetts — as is true for Americans generally — wanted tougher gun limits and the pro-gun forces were unhappy with the legislation that got passed. But with Romney the truth matters little.

Like any good businessman, Romney tries one approach, then another, then another, until he hits on the one that moves the most product. Truth be damned. For Romney — in politics as in business — the only thing that counts is the profit. For the kind of vulture capitalist he was, it’s whatever would make him and his already rich clients the most money — never mind the jobs sent to China, the manufacturing towns dismantled, the lives destroyed.

Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, used to promote his admiration for Ayn Rand, until someone pointed out that she was a chain-smoking Russian atheist who ended her days on welfare. But Mitt Romney — the “job creator” who built an empire for himself and his kind at the expense of the people beneath him — he’s the real John Galt from Atlas Shrugged.

Why the Fascination with Guns?

I grew up in gun country. When we moved from a small town in southeastern Iowa to the farthest fringe suburb of Minneapolis in the late 1950s, one block away began the first corn field, which connected to other corn fields, and hay fields, and wheat fields and, cow pastures and later soybean and sugar beet fields, stretching westward across the gently rolling prairie to the Dakotas and beyond.

Photo: Kan. Credit: Craig Hacker/LA Times

Like my own parents, most of the adults in our cookie cutter development that sprang up after World War II had grown up in the small towns and farms that once gave the Upper Midwest’s people their distinctive character. They came to the big city for a better life but hunting was in their blood, for most of the fathers and at least some of the mothers.

Jimmy Swanson’s dad, the plumber next door, had a couple of shotguns, as I recall, for duck hunting. Gary Hansen’s parents, the house painter and his homemaker wife across the street, had a rather ornate gun case, if memory serves, filled with scoped rifles for deer hunting. Craig Eide’s dad, the milkman two doors down, had guns, too, I think. (It was Minnesota, remember: there were Scandhoovians as far as the eye could see.)

An anomaly already because of his advanced education for that working class neighborhood, my Dad had a Ph.D. but only one gun, the M-1 carbine he brought home from World War II, along with the ceremonial Nazi dagger he liberated from a German officer’s body in Aachen shortly before he himself was wounded. The M-1’s barrel was spiked. It wasn’t for shooting. It wasn’t even for show, as it sat most often behind the suits in Dad’s closet.

Unlike my friend’s dads, mine didn’t hunt. He didn’t care much for guns, even though he completed a 30-year military career as an Army Reserve colonel. Later, when I was older, he said his time tramping through France, Belgium, Holland, and into Germany with a rifle in his hands had taken away any joy he might have felt from gunplay. I understood. I had recently returned from combat duty in Vietnam.

But earlier, I think for my twelfth birthday, my Dad gave me the best present a boy could have, in that part of the country, at that point in time: a bolt-action .22 caliber rifle with a six-round clip and a notch sight.

Once, in a 50-year-old memory, I lay in a hay field with Uncle Rich, sighting down maybe 80 yards across a hay field he called the “lower forty,” toward a duck floating peacefully in the lake – Little Island Lake — mostly encompassed by Rich’s farm.

It wasn’t duck hunting season, but we figured I’d be lucky enough to hit the lake, never mind the bird. So I breathed deeply, sighted down the barrel with my left eye – my shooting eye – and squeezed off a single round. The bullet plinked into the water not six inches from the duck, startling me and Uncle Rich every bit as much as the quickly departing bird.

Later, those marksmanship lessons stood me in good stead, when I joined the Army – to “straighten out my life,” of all things. In training, I rather easily qualified as an expert marksmen with both M-14 and M-15 rifles, and later with the M-60 machinegun I carried for my first several months in combat.

But We Aren’t Talking About Taking Away Hunting Rifles

Dave had helped look after my Uncle Rich for the last years of his life, for our stepfather Sim, and for my Mom, who lives now at a home in Boulder City. Dave had always lived alone, but his house, garage, and a storage shed are filled to the rafters with these other people’s possessions.

As my brother Doug and I began putting Dave’s affairs in order, we came across two guns stored out back in the garage – an old shotgun and an even older .22 calibre rifle. For just a moment, I thought the .22 might be my old boyhood treasure. But the one in my hands in Henderson was larger, sturdier than what I recall from years ago, and it didn’t have a six-round clip.

Still, the heft of the gun in my hands triggered thoughts of how my life might have been different if I had stayed in Minnesota, how Dave’s life might have been different if he had stayed back home where he fit so much better than he ever did in Las Vegas.

If I hadn’t gone off to college in New York City at 17 and spent every day of my adult life (save those two years in the army) living in the middle of big cities – New York, Washington DC, Minneapolis, and now Los Angeles – there’s every chance I would have stayed connected to the gun culture of my youth.

I did only a little actual hunting beyond the tin cans and birch trees I bagged, but I loved tramping around my Uncle’s hilly, heavily forested farm and especially loved the deep, mysterious woods of northern Minnesota, where I took several long canoe trips.

If I had fallen in with the right set of friends – and especially if I had taken that small town newspapering job a journalism professor pointed me toward – I can imagine I would have been like Misters Swanson, Hansen, and Eide, coming home every year or so with a big six-point buck draped over the hood of the family station wagon, crunching through the snow into the driveway.

(Okay, there’s a big “maybe” in that. I can picture the woods, the family station wagon, the snow-lined street, and the coming home parts. But it might have been with a camera full of photographs and a rump roast in the back seat that I picked up at the local butcher shop.)

Which is a long way of saying that Mitt Romney – and the NRA, for that matter – have got it all wrong on gun control. No one, not even the most rabid anti-gun advocate, is talking about taking away a single hunter’s hunting rifle. My precious .22 calibre rifle would be safe in anyone’s plans.

What we don’t want – what reasonable people don’t want – is automatic weapons in anyone’s hands, assault rifles and machineguns anyplace but well-guarded military armories, and armor-piercing shells and body armor anyplace but in the movies.

But Mitt Romney – because he has no values beyond promoting his own and Lady Romney’s welfare – he’ll take the NRA’s money and oppose any sort of reasonable gun regulation. Which makes him forever the Gun Lobby’s Mitch.

About Dick Price

Dick Price is Editor of the LA Progressive. With his wife Sharon, he publishes several other print and online newsletters on political and social justice issues. He has worked in publishing as a writer, editor, and publisher for a quarter century. In earlier releases, he was a cab driver, bartender, construction worker, soldier, and farmhand, and for many years helped operate a nonprofit halfway house for homeless alcoholics and addicts. To contact him, please use the form on the Contact Us page.

I’m curious as to why this article is illustrated with a picture of a young man with a shotgun. Is that supposed to bother people? To make them think something’s wrong? I personally have put a shotgun into the hands of more than one young man like him, and I think it’s a good thing.

It was a stock image meant to look something like me as a kid, walking across my uncle’s fields with a couple shotguns over my shoulder. The article only talks about me learning to use a .22 caliber rifle, but I also learned how to shoot shotguns. It doesn’t look very scary to me.

“No one, not even the most rabid anti-gun advocate, is talking about taking away a single hunter’s hunting rifle. My precious .22 calibre rifle would be safe in anyone’s plans.”

Nonsense. Plenty of gun “control” people would like to see private ownership of guns completely eliminated. Hang around the Chicago City Council meetings when they debate “gun control” and see what you hear.

“what we don’t want – what reasonable people don’t want – is automatic weapons in anyone’s hands, assault rifles and machineguns anyplace but well-guarded military armories, and armor-piercing shells and body armor anyplace but in the movies.”

Automatic weapons are ALREADY banned by Federal law. I have seen this so many times in posts proposing the restriction of Second Amendment rights. Automatic weapons – including machine guns, did you realize your sentence was redundant – are banned from private ownership by Federal law except for some very highly restricted exceptions. Please name ONE crime that has taken place in the U.S. that has involved the use of an automatic weapon.

Assault rifle? There’s no such thing. There’s a legal definition of assault rifle, but it simply specifies some semi-automatic rifles while other semi-automatic rifles with the same characteristics are not included. There is no sensible definition of “assault rifle”.

Please. There are assault rifles specifically designed for use in combat. Lots of them and deadlier with every iteration. Now police departments use them. They are not designed for use in hunting. Why would you want to shoot a duck five times or a deer 20 times?

There are exceptions that allow for the ownership and sale of fully automatic weapons, if they were in private hands before a certain date some years ago, before restrictions were passed. And some in the gun lobby who want automatic weapons available, to protect people from who knows what.

Sure, in Chicage and probably a few other cities were people are being killed wholesale, I’m sure there are people who want guns banned in the city. So that’s an overstatement by me. But I bet even they wouldn’t want to stop Illinois hunters from being able to drive up to Wisconsin and Minnesota to go hunting.

Thanks for your
military service. I am sure it and your
youth gives you some insight into others such as myself, who still own guns
long after our service if over.
Actually, I am still under oath, as in my case my oath does not
expire. I have several weapons, a 12
gage shot gun. a 410 shot gun, a 9mm Russian TT-33 Tokarev with laser sight, a
45 cal automatic, and a 22 automatic.

My wife and I lived
in occupied Berlin, surrounded by
east Germans for a hundred miles in every direction. The evacuation plan was to drive down a
highway for 115 miles, and my thought of that not being possible led me to
teach my wife how to shoot a handgun. I started
with a 22 cal but upgraded to the 9mm, at least it could stop a human, where as
the 22 cal can knock down a can or a bottle, but a human only with a deadly
head or heart shot. I am sure you would
have been unhappy with a 22 cal weapon in nam.

I believe in the 2nd
amendment and that we are a country of citizen soldiers who should be ready to
defend our family, our neighbors, and citizens.
This is also designed to protect us from our government if need be. I am not in favor of fully automatic weapons
for non-military persons, but I also know the bad guys have them.

I personally have no problem with a responsible, well-trained individual keeping standard firearms at home, for protection or for sport. I know a bit about your background, so you’d fit right in that category — though with all the guns you list, I might be a bit nervous if you lived next door and ever raised your voice with your wife.

Of course, the Second Amendment doesn’t talk about self protection or sport or even hunting for sustenance:

The Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

And Romney, Ryan, and the NRA are not protecting gun ownership as part of a “well-regulated militia.” Cripes, Mitch Romney used up four deferments to escape duty in the Vietnam War he so vehemently supported. You and I went to Vietnam — willingly in both cases, it would appear — while millionaire’s son Mitt Romney went to Paris, for chrissakes.

Plus, Paul Ryan and all five Romney boys came to age when they could have served their country in the military — and they all ran, not walked, away from the recruitment office.

I find it a bit galling when these mostly white Republican male politicians who turned over every rock to avoid serving their country are always the first to puff up their chests about how tough they are and how much they want to send other people’s sons and daughters into combat.

Well said Dick .
I am a Firearms enthusiast but I don’t want assault rifes in the General Public’s hands either .
IMO , Childhood Firearms training such as you received , should be mandatory both for safety reasons and because I think it would de mystify them .
Firearms are just tools after all , Mechanics like me , don’t collect Torque Wrenches , we understand their proper use and care , Firearms should be the same .
-Nate

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